Daniel's blog

Couple days ago I wrote a blog post on how much can we do in a day. The main point was that if we schedule lot of things, it will force us to cut off our unproductive activities and focus only on the relevant ones (I suggest you read it first if you have not read it yet). If you get into this habit, you are probably going to have more genuinely free time than you had before despite the fact you are getting more things done. This blog post is about what to do with all that free time and on what you can do with your time in general.

We were asked to write down how we would like to spend our time while at LSE at our introduction lecture couple weeks ago.  I am now applying for consultancies so I used a framework I learned a long time ago from a great speaker and friend of mine called Houston Spencer, himself an ex-McKinsey consultant. It identifies four main areas you should devote your time to. These are:

1. Relationships – family, friends, girlfriend/boyfriend
2. Professional – work related activities
3. Body – sports, taking care of your health, appearance
4. Mind – reading, meditation, listening to relaxation music etc.

 
This is how Houston put it down:

Draw these on an x/y axis and then think what activities you want to do each of these areas. While your priorities might change depending on the stage of life you are in, you should take care to have at least something in every domain.

And here is a brief sketch I did in the lecture:

I would encourage you to be a lot more specific and spend some time doing this exercise. You might get some great insights. Here is how to do it:

1. Think how fulfilled you are in each area now.

2. What percentage of your time are you investing into each area now?

3. What percentage of your time do you want to be investing into each area in the future?

Closing thoughts

Did you see any correlation between your satisfaction with each area and your investment?
What are your goals for each area for now, in one year, five years from now?
What would you like your time investment mix to look like in the future? Is it realistic given the goals you set for yourself?

Now that I am back at uni, I have to balance my time between lectures, studying, applying for jobs, setting up my own business, working out, going out, and many other things. This has led me to a question of how much can I actually do in one day. I am sure you have asked yourself that question many times before as well. I have recently read a book by C. Northcote Parkinson, The Parkinson’s Law, which might offer us an answer.

One of the most famous Parkinson’s laws postulates that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. I think this is very true. Just imagine you are sitting in your room and have to for example write a short report for a class/your boss and you have three hours to do so. You would probably spend the first half an hour on facebook, the next half an hour deciding what to write about, ten minutes checking your email, hour and half writing the report with some more facebook in between and use the remaining time for formatting it and watching videos on youtube.

Now suppose you have only an hour to write the report because you are also planning to go to a gym for an hour and to catch up with a friend over a coffee afterwards to discuss your new business idea. I bet you would finish the report to a comparable if not better standard in that one hour of focused work and manage to do two more important things in those same three hours.

So what is the moral? Do not be afraid to schedule lot of activities in your day because it will only make you more effective in whatever you are doing. If I am under a pressure of a packed day and tight deadlines, I cut off most of my unproductive time such as facebook, focus on work at hand more intensively and therefore complete it a lot faster and to a higher standard, do many other things and at the end of the day, still end up with more free time than I had before.

The next blog post will be on what you can actually do with all that new free time.

As a follow up to my previous article on entrepreneurship, here is one more great advice I keep hearing a lot lately, last time from Sunny Midha, a successful entrepreneur, a tech venture capitalist and LSE graduate. And the advice is – get on the phone!

If you want something, you need to ask for it. If you have the courage and determination to call up a big guy and ask him for help, odds are you will be able to make use of that help as well.

Equally importantly, get on the phone to your potential customers to test if the idea you are thinking about would be of an interest to them. Have they bought anything like this before? Why yes, why not?

Last but not least, it’s a great way to get a job as well. One management consulting head hunter and a friend of mine, gave a talk earlier this week on getting into the industry. One of his top advices was to read related press and if a partner from an organization you want to work for has an article there or is quoted, get on the phone to his company and say you want to talk to XY about his recent article in Z. His/her assistant will probably put you through and the partner will be delighted you read the article and found it interesting enough to enquire more. Towards the end of the call, say you are considering your next career steps and got really interested in this segment of the industry. ‘Can you help me please?’ pause… While she will not probably offer you a job outright, people rarely give you a straight no as well. She might recommend you to their HR or to a friend from another consultancy in the sector which is hiring right now.

I have started my MSc Decision Sciences degree at the London School of Economics this week and one of the great things about LSE is that it attracts a wide range of remarkable speakers who come and give public lectures on the campus. I have missed out on Kofi Annan but managed to attend Gurbaksh Chahal’s lecture. He dropped out of high school at the age of 16 and by the time he was 25 he built and sold two companies worth over $340 million dollars in total. Being now slightly over thirty, he’s now building a third one, already valued at over $500 million. Here are some of his ideas on entrepreneurship I particularly liked.

Entrepreneurship is like a roller coaster,
it has its ups and downs
but it is your choice
to scream or enjoy the ride.

The idea is 1%, execution is 99%
I really like this one. Many people have great ideas, but they never get down to realising them. Some people guard their idea, afraid somebody would steal it. I think that sharing your ideas with others can open you many unknown doors and provide you with valuable feedback and help with execution.

Culture is everything
Gurbaksh argued that the first 15 to 20 people you hire will define DNA of the whole organization which will in turn determine if the company will remain a small one or will grow successfully. One bad hire not dealt with quickly can destroy the company – so he recommended us that if we make a hiring mistake, it is OK to fire the person the first week or even the first day.

Grow a thick skin, a very thick skin
People will intentionally or unintentionally question your ability to succeed. You need to get over it and not get put down by it. Ignore it; create your own reality (this was coming up a lot also in Steve Job’s biography I was writing about some time back – he called it distorted reality – you persuade people around you that impossible is possible until it becomes reality). He encouraged us to overcome any fear or insecurities we might have and just get on with things, keep trying and learning from what we do.

We are confronted every day with tips, advices, rules and expectations in all aspects of our lives. We often understand them only superficially, yet we treat them as some kind of eternal truth and guide our behaviours accordingly. But how relevant are they in nowadays world and what were they really aiming to achieve when they were first formulated? I came across two such rules recently which made me think about the topic further.

Pre-marriage sex

Having travelled and lived in Asia, I came to accept the concept of no sex before marriage as something ingrained in parts of the society and as one of those timeless cultural habits you do not question. My friend of Chinese origin pointed to me last week however, the absurdity of trying to fit a centuries old rule to these times. Historically, people lived 30 to 40 years on average. They got married as soon as they could have babies or even earlier, in order to survive and manage to bring up new generations before they die. This corresponds to age of 12 – 15 for girls. Put simply, they did not have much time to get naughty. Also, women were dependent on man for survival and stood no chances of being able to bring up kids on their own. A lot has changed since.

Many people get married nowadays at the age when our ancestors used to die yet people are still expected to have no pre-marriage sex. That is ten to fifteen years of waiting people did not have to endure before coupled with widespread availability of contraceptive methods and economic opportunities for woman to be single mothers should they want to do so. How relevant is the rule nowadays when times are so different?

Drinking red wine at room temperature

Couple days later, I was having some red wine with my grandfather. I know that we chill white wine and drink the red one at a room temperature. I was therefore surprised that he put it in a fridge in between pouring it into our glasses. What I learned is that the idea of ‘room temperature’ comes from medieval times when there was one fireplace in a huge room and consequently the temperature there was about 14°C. A lot less than the 20°C we have in our homes these days and what we now understand as room temperature. It tasted great.

So next time somebody tells you a moral, take it with a pinch of salt. Chances are, circumstances under which it was first formulated have changed a lot making in either irrelevant or deceiving if taken on its face value.

I finished my last placement with AIESEC on Friday August 31st which was the last thing as did as an active member of the organization. Now, I am an alumnus. I have spent amazing five years in the organization and have had countless life changing experiences I will remember until the end of my life.

I was a chair at an AIESEC conference in Moscow the very next day . I saw how much more the delegates have ahead of them and I felt little jealous that my experience is over. On the other hand I felt proud of myself that I have grabbed every opportunity available to me over the five years and made the most out of that time. I was feeling satisfied and at peace with myself, excited about the future.

During the closing plenary, I encouraged the delegates to fully embrace the next couple years ahead of them. I wished them to be proactive in creating powerful experiences for themselves and to have as many great memories as I have to look back on 20 years later.

One of my favourite quotes is from Mark Twain:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

And how about you, are the experiences you are living now so powerful that you will you remember them 20 years later?

I have recently recalled a conversation I had with my German boss in Grameen Creative Lab in Colombia. He gave me a very powerful insight, which he himself heard from his previous boss, about priorities in life, which I would like to share with you.

We are often juggling with many balls at the same time. Some of them, such as our professional life, are made of rubber and bounce back if we drop them. But other ones, such as our relationships and health, are made of glass and can shatter into many small pieces if we let them fall on the ground.

I would also add our own pride amongst the rubber ones.

I guess it is more easily said than done, but next time you are juggling with your priorities again, be careful not to drop the fragile glass balls.

I am now working in Moscow as a facilitator in an English speaking club which means I have lot of interesting conversations on a range of issues with local Russian people. Sometimes we continue these discussions even after club meetings. Couple days ago, I was talking to a physicist in his fifties who recently changed a job and now works as a sales manager for a Swiss engineering company. Being interested in my master’s degree which I will be starting soon, he said that he would like to share with me two big discoveries he made throughout his life. I was expecting something highly theoretical but instead I got two very practical advices, which can hardly be explained using mathematics and which on first glance might seem rather obvious but are actually very powerful and often not used.

He made the first one right after finishing his degree: If you are thinking about somebody, that person is usually thinking about you as well.

The second one occurred to him only three years ago, as an evolution of the first one: If you are thinking about somebody positively, the other person will think about you positively as well and vice versa.

On reflection, I realised that I have observed these phenomena many times before as well but I have never stopped to think about it and to formulate it. And they are so true!

Try recalling some situations as well. Think about when you approached somebody in a bad temper, feeling hostile towards that person. Chances are the person responded in a similar fashion, even if what you actually said was perfectly polite. Now think about a situation when you came to somebody thinking about that person really positively. A big difference, right?

I know one Canadian girl who is always happy, smiling and talks to people in a really positive way. Even if she is asking them to work harder or giving bad news, people react to her very well and generally tend to agree with whatever she says. I have always been admiring her for that but have never realised that the reason for such reception might be as simple as thinking about people in a positive way.

Try it, it works

Data on its own have only limited usefulness. It is only when we interpret them as information that we can understand what they actually mean. Consider a company knowing somebody’s date of birth. Unless we know also the date of this year and we are able to subtract those two to get the age of the customer, the data would be useless. Once translated into information (age), the company can tailor its proposition by e.g. offering a youth discount. That was easy, but how to make sense of huge amounts of seemingly unrelated data organizations are amassing these days?

The Economist published in May a very interesting article on big data and new businesses focusing on this market. Especially big banks are making use big data to detect fraudulent transactions. They collect lots of data about each transaction such as the amount, date, location or name of the sender. If everything was ok, the data would have certain patterns and would not deviate from them in the short term in a specific way. People would be depositing certain amounts of money in city A and sending e.g. 3% to city B in another country. Sometimes there are exceptions, but those happen on random basis. When analysing big data, companies therefore focus on deviations from standard patterns and focus on new emerging ones. If there are suddenly lot of transactions from the one city to another one, it raises a red flag to be investigated.

It’s all about patterns

I was reading this article when I was still living in China and thought how else can this concept be used. And I came up with one example. I lived in a city called Suzhou and every Friday evening took a train ride to Shanghai and returned back late on Sunday. When buying tickets I had to show my passport and they noted its number. If I was working in China on an incorrect visa, I would be in trouble. As an application of big data analysis, the Chinese authorities can for example track passport numbers of train passengers and look for patterns where there should be none. One would not expect somebody with a tourist visa to be making regular trips over two months – such person should be travelling randomly across the country. Unsure of how sophisticated they are I started using my driving license which looks similar to Chinese id card instead of my passport every now and then, just to be on the safe side.

Can you think of some other situations where you can find patters and how this information can be used?

When I got elected as the President of AIESEC UK, my predecessor told me that one of the key things to learn for the role is the art of saying no. My mentor from my Board of Directors was telling me the same thing throughout the year as well. I can still hear him saying something along the lines of ‘Deciding what you are going to do is the easy part, the hard bit is saying what you are not going to do and sticking to it.’ And he was right! I have just finished reading Steve Jobs’ biography and one of the main reasons for his success was… you guessed it – saying no.

Jobs often hurt people when saying no. He would call up a team meeting and then publicly say that what they did is shit and fire half of the people. May be it hurt somebody’s feelings but it also created a culture of excellence whereby only the best people stayed in the company and were not dragged down by the mediocre ones. Those people then worked beyond their perceived limits to create revolutionary products. The ones that survived remember those times as the most fulfilling ones in their lifes. Those that were fired or resigned went on to work for average companies where they may be succeeded and lead happy lifes. While saying no was painful in the short term, it was to everyone’s advantage in the long term.

Apple started making lots of average products after Jobs left. One of the first things he did upon his return, besides firing mediocre people, was to cancel most projects and focus only on a few key ones. This way, we have only few types of Macs, iPod, iPhone and iPad. Other companies have much wider ranges of products but they are nowhere close to the simplicity and functionality of Apple’s gadgets. He was able to zoom out to see the big picture, say no to 90% of ideas and then zoom in again to focus all his energy on the most promising 10%, making sure they are executed flawlessly.

Saying no is not easy, but it is necessary to learn it. Jobs did not care about the feelings of others and was always very direct. The Chinese or Japanese are on the other hand very subtle and express disagreement in very convoluted ways which however do work as well because the whole society works that way and people know how to decode the message. So make sure you find your way and start saying no to mediocre things that suck your energy and do not contribute to much.